BARRE — When heavy rains inundated Vermont on July 10, Doug and Rhoda Mason were sitting in the living room of their Barre City home. The power was out, which worried Doug Mason because their basement had over a foot of water in it and their sump pump wasn’t running.
As they sat in the dark, they heard trees snapping on the hill behind the house. One tree fell on a car in the driveway. As the sounds intensified, they called 911 and were on the line with a dispatcher right as the hillside gave way behind the house. A landslide struck it, rolling up the first floor like a “jelly roll,” Doug Mason said. He found himself pinned to his chair by a card table that landed on him. Rhoda Mason was thrown from the couch.
Doug Mason told the dispatcher to send the fire department. It took 10 or 15 minutes for emergency responders to arrive at the house, Doug Mason said. “But it seemed like, you know, four hours.”
The landslide had knocked the house off its foundation, but the structure still stood, crooked and unsafe. Firefighters opened a side window and removed the occupants. Both Masons and their dog were unhurt. They’ve been staying with their children ever since while they look for a house to buy or rent.
The slide was among a whopping 74 fallen slopes and potential landslides that state geologists have been evaluating since the mid-July flooding. Experts worry the phenomenon could become more common in Vermont alongside an expected increase in extreme weather events and precipitation caused by climate change. This time around, Vermonters have been caught by surprise and, in some cases, trapped in a bureaucratic maze as they seek assistance. The state’s geology department, meanwhile, is stretched thin as it responds to a flood of requests to assess failing slopes.
“It’s historic. We have not seen anything like this, to my knowledge,” said Ben DeJong, the state geologist. Not, at least, since state scientists have been responding to landslides.
‘The trees talk’
Almost a month after the July floods, DeJong walked along a crack in the earth near an old railway above Pike Street in Barre. A broad swath of the mountainside had pulled away from the ground above it by about a foot or two, creating a long scar of exposed soil between the stable hillside on top and unstable land below it, which was at risk of sliding.
Some hundred feet away, a section of hillside had already slid, rendering a nearby mobile home uninhabitable. Its owner, according to DeJong, said he had moved to high ground to avoid being flooded in the river corridor.
Green Mountain Power stabilized the roadway at the top of the slide to reach its power lines, but officials were still determining how best to clean the slope and mitigate future impacts.
As for the hillside that hadn’t yet fallen — it would take a full geotechnical evaluation to understand what was occurring on the landscape, DeJong said.
Two homes almost directly below the site had been condemned. The forest floor that backed up to one of the homes seemed to bulge slightly, and trees tilted forward in a direction that did not naturally align with the slope.
“The trees talk, and they’re telling you that this is active,” DeJong said.
The Vermont Geological Survey, a program within the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation, has three full-time employees, and their schedules are typically busy in the summer.
“We do not have dedicated staff to this sort of thing,” DeJong said.
After the July storm hit and the program had to survey dozens of slopes, the team realized it needed help. It called in a professor from Norwich University, as well as other staff from the Department of Environmental Conservation, and it recruited four geotechnical experts from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation.
Nearly a month later, DeJong and his colleagues were still getting requests to assess sites that appeared to be at risk of sliding.
Landslides typically occur on steep slopes that have loose material, DeJong said. Add a lot of water and “what you’re essentially doing is, you’re reducing the resistance of that slope to fall down, right, or to fail,” he said.
The water wears away the strength of the slope and can put new pressure in unfamiliar places.
“When you start seeing tension cracks on the surface, it’s just literally the slope starting to pull away. And sometimes — not every time, but sometimes — if you go to the base of that slope, you’ll also see where the soils are starting to bulge out at the toe of the slope,” DeJong said.
Barre has been home to a sizable percentage of the failing landscapes following the flooding.
Nicolas Storellicastro, the Barre city manager, said during a city council meeting on Aug. 8 that the city had identified about 20 landslides as a result of the flood. That figure includes those that have already occurred and unstable locations officials are watching. The city has recently worked with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the state to identify the highest-priority slides. The next steps would be to engage with a geotechnical specialist who would recommend how to mitigate them.
“This has been a slower-moving process just because it’s been new to all of us here on the staff and frankly it was much more challenging for many of the other people in the state who could have otherwise assisted us,” Storellicastro said.
DeJong said much of Barre was built out in the 1950s and 1960s, when the granite industry was booming. In many instances, developers used waste granite, also known as grout, to make a slope buildable.
“It’s a good material to use because it locks in together and it drains water really well,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean that it was designed to hold the load, right?”
DeJong said the state has divided the landslide sites, and those at risk of sliding, into risk categories. A category 1 site previously posed a risk but doesn’t anymore. A category 2 is not at imminent risk of sliding but needs long-term monitoring resources to understand future risks.
“We would like to either identify a mitigation for the slope there or, for example, put together a monitoring plan so that we can see if that slope is changing over time,” DeJong said.
Category 3 is a no-man’s land that DeJong said the state is trying to avoid. Sites should either be considered safe or unsafe, he said. Category 4 means the site is too risky to occupy, and any nearby homes or buildings are condemned, red-tagged and considered uninhabitable.
Red-tagged
In Barre, another problem area lies on a steep bank behind the home of Andrea Young.
Young’s house sits next to a ravine about 70 feet above a brook. Looking at her property, the house seems untouched. The only sign of trouble last week was yellow caution tape in the backyard. But since July 14, Young’s house has been red-tagged and she has not been allowed to live in her home due to the threat of a landslide.
Young actually works in emergency preparedness for the FEMA national exercise division. She was working in Louisiana when Barre started to flood on July 10. But her mother was staying at her house and providing regular updates on the rain via text message. Her mother reported hearing trees snapping in the ravine.
When Young returned home on July 13, she finally looked around her property firsthand.
“If you didn’t know what you were looking at, you wouldn’t know that there was a problem because it wasn’t obvious, like my house wasn’t hanging over the ravine or anything like that,” Young said.
On the morning of July 14, she thought it looked like the land in her backyard near the ravine had moved. She called the fire department, and firefighters arrived along with DeJong. They pointed out signs that the ground itself was pulling away from the foundation of the house, with visible cracks forming.
One by one, all utilities to her house were shut off. She was instructed that she could visit the house briefly, as long as she was “vigilant” and paying attention to the ground in the backyard. A fire department official told Young that he could not sleep at night knowing someone was staying in the house.
Young said she felt fortunate and lined up a camper in which to live. She had been staying in the camper ever since, but she didn’t want to remain in it over the winter.
After Young filed a claim for FEMA assistance, she said, a site inspector visited her property but didn’t actually inspect its back side because it had been taped off by the fire department. FEMA denied Young’s claim, explaining that the damage to her property was not caused by flooding.
In an emailed statement, FEMA spokesperson Angelique Smythe said, “A condemnation notice does not necessarily indicate the home is destroyed per FEMA standards.”
Young plans to file an appeal, but to do that she needs more paperwork that has been challenging to track down — including a record clearly stating that she can’t live in her house.
When Young called her home insurance company, she said, its representatives told her that, without an “earth movement” insurance policy, nothing would be covered.
Young said everyone she has spoken with has been understanding and helpful and that she understands why the aftermath has been tough to navigate.
“I work in emergency preparedness,” Young said. “In the initial stages of any kind of disaster, there’s a lot of confusion. I totally understand that.”
But without clear answers, Young is left wondering if this will bankrupt her — having to pay for a house she can’t live in. “Or is it going to be part of a buyback program? And what does that mean? And what are the rules?”
‘Wow’ factor
For the rest of the season, DeJong plans to watch the landscapes, wary that some category 2 or category 4 sites could still slide.
“We don’t have to be concerned every time it rains. I’m not worried about that,” he said.
Rather, he’d be concerned if the groundwater levels stayed high throughout the summer, and then Vermont received more heavy rainfall. Record-warm temperatures at the surface of the Atlantic Ocean and El Niño conditions have caused forecasters to predict an “above-normal” hurricane season, according to Inside Climate News.
The day DeJong walked along the former Barre railroad, where one site had already slid and another threatened to, wildfires engulfed western Maui, Hawaii, killing at least 99 people — and counting. Vermont’s air quality was diminished that day from ongoing wildfires in Quebec. In late July, the southern United States faced exceptional heat. It was the hottest June on record and, globally, July 2023 was the hottest month ever recorded on Earth.
In Vermont, climate change continues to show up in new ways. According to the Vermont Climate Assessment, average annual precipitation has increased 21% since 1900, and it’s become more variable in the last decade. Floods hammered parts of the state in mid-July and again in early August. And while land in Vermont has slid before, the high number of landslides, or sites at risk of sliding, is a new phenomenon.
The question in DeJong’s mind, he said, is: With the predicted changes induced by climate change, is this something we must now expect from a July weather event?
This time, the storm stalled out over the Green Mountains, which acted “like a juicer, squeezing the moisture out of the system,” he said. Now, the spine of the Green Mountains is where most of the past and potential landslide sites exist.
“If something like that, that we just experienced, could potentially keep happening, then, I don’t want to be alarmist, but I also want to be realistic,” he said. “This could be something we deal with again, yeah.”
During the July flooding, DeJong said he warned his boss that landscapes would be prone to sliding. He thought the state might experience three or four landslides. He had no idea that number would climb into the 70s, and would take over his life for a month.
“I still have the ‘wow’ factor every single day,” he said.
‘Just a different color and thickness’
The city of Barre contacted the Masons, the Portland Street family trapped in their home by a landslide, around the end of July and said the house needed to come down because it was deemed a threat to the street. The removal cost was to be covered by the city, but the Masons were also concerned about what that would mean for their FEMA aid. After some back and forth, the demolition proceeded last Wednesday.
Devin Mason — Doug and Rhoda Mason’s son, who grew up in the home — said taking the city’s offer to demolish the house was a tough decision because the family still didn’t know if removing it would affect any potential buyout in the future. After a presidentially declared disaster, local officials may decide to request money from the state to buy properties that have either flooded or been substantially damaged. Seventy-five percent of any buyout cost is paid by FEMA and the rest is paid by the state and/or local government. However, a FEMA fact sheet says, “It is important to note that many flooded properties don’t qualify for a buyout, funding is limited and requests for funding may exceed available resources.”
Devin Mason said state and federal officials with whom he had spoken have been kind and helpful, but there’s only a “very select” group of people who work in situations involving disaster relief and buyouts. Even for them, this situation is new, particularly when it involves landslides.
“They’re kind of flying blind to start and they’re figuring it out as they go,” Devin Mason said.
The Masons received the maximum benefit from FEMA: $41,000. Whether they will get more from a potential buyout remains to be determined.
“We still don’t know if mudslides will be covered through the disaster because it wasn’t part of the flood, which is kind of silly to me, because it is part of the flood. It’s just a different color and thickness,” Doug Mason said.
Last Wednesday morning, Doug Mason stood in front of his property and watched his home get torn apart by an excavator.
Earlier that morning, he told crews demolishing the house that there were a few items he was never able to get out of the house before the slide occurred. In particular, he wanted a lockbox that contained birth certificates and other important documents. He described where he thought it would be in the house.
Somehow, workers found the lockbox as the heavy equipment picked apart the building. They handed it over to Doug Mason, along with family photo albums, boxes of baseball cards and a baby blanket that once belonged to Devin Mason.
Visibly emotional, Doug and Devin Mason hugged neighbors as they watched the demolition. By 10 a.m., the house was nothing more than a pile of debris on its way into a series of dumpsters.
